Música y acompañamiento sonoro

Some researchers argue that the nature of mass tourism in the Global South reflects a neocolonial continuation of a master-servant relationship, which amounts to “a way of retaining the subordination of the Third World to the First World” (Mowforth and Munt, 2003: 52). There are three broad economic critiques of mass tourism that pervade much of the critical research on the subject. The first is that the ‘multiplier effect’ promised by champions of mass tourism has consistently failed to translate to major, widely dispersed benefits to ‘host’ communities (Spenceley and Meyer, 2012; Mbaiwa, 2005; Britton, 1982; Matthews, 1977). Second, critics argue that mass tourism development routinely fails to alleviate poverty in the communities in which it occurs, and instead tends to reinforce and exacerbate socio-economic disparities. This is because the spaces of mass tourism primarily generate low-wage, low-skill jobs and fail to complement or enhance other livelihoods, or else serve to displace them altogether (Spenceley and Meyer, 2012). Third, critics claim that mass tourism tends to perpetuate dependency on transnational corporations based in the Global North for expertise, high-waged personnel, technology, and a range of imports, as well as on wealthy citizens of the North for tourist expenditures. Because of this recurring failure to generate sufficient and widely-dispersed benefits for host communities, critical scholars have stressed that mass tourism is regularly

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associated with social tensions and dissatisfied local residents (Scheyvens, 2011; Pattullo, 2005;

Shaw and Williams, 2002; Opperman and Chon, 1997).

According to Mowforth and Munt (2003: 52), mass tourism in the Global South amounts to “an advanced form of ‘post-colonialism’” in that it retains a fundamental subordination to the Global North. From this perspective, subordinate regions can be seen to comprise what Weaver (1988) terms the ‘pleasure periphery’, as they are politically and economically marginalized within the global economic system, and positioned as spaces of leisure for travelers

predominantly from the Global North, as well as sites of profits for various corporations such as hotel chains, airlines, and tour companies. Tourists to tropical spaces tend to have certain

expectations and pre-conceived imagery of local cultures and environments, including what will be enticing or unique as they search for an authentic experience, a broad set of desires and beliefs that Urry (1996) has famously described as the ‘tourist gaze’.

There have been many cases where local residents have been physically excluded from some of the most beautiful recreational areas of their countries, such as lost access to beaches (Buzinde and Manuel-Navarrete, 2013; Carlisle and Jones, 2012; Nelson, 2012), due to the privatization of these spaces, with profit-seeking actors limiting access through prohibitive prices and increased barriers and security. Cuba was the first major site of mass tourism in the

Caribbean, and prior to the Cuban Revolution in 1959 had begun to pioneer early forms of

‘tourism apartheid’, wherein most Cubans except for a small elite were turned away from

prestigious beaches and clubs. As a result, the revolutionary government saw this as an important feature of social inequality in the country and immediately sought to transform the industry (Carty, 2009). It was not until the 1990s that tourism in Cuba began rising again in the face of new political economic pressures, and though the government has insisted on partnering with all

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foreign investors in the sector, the dramatic growth of all-inclusive resorts has created new dynamics of social exclusion. As Sidaway (2007: 334) puts it, there has been a partial return to the past, as “these exclusive spaces are [again] effectively closed to all but a fraction of Cuba’s population.”

While the Cuban Revolution contributed to the rise of mass tourism in other parts of the Caribbean, there were also earlier precedents. One notable case is described by Taylor (1993), who discusses how the privatization of White Sands Beach (now Doctor’s Cave Beach) in Montego Bay in 1929 led to increased prices and enduring social exclusion in an area that was once the primary public space where residents swam, but which is to this day a space dominated by a combination of tourists and wealthy local residents. Another glaring aspect of social

inequality associated with mass tourism relates to how physical space is segregated along racial and class lines, something which is especially acute in destinations like the Caribbean and can serve as a constant reminder of the violence and servitude of the colonial past to local residents and workers (Sinclair-Maragh and Gursoy, 2015; Gibson, 2009; Munt, 1994; Taylor, 1993).

Taylor (1993: 89) suggests that mass tourism in the Caribbean not only reflects but “resuscitates the dying master-servant culture” in new ways, with tourism spaces serving as sites “of subtle black-white confrontation.” While overt conflict is rare, the social dynamics between mostly low-wage hotel workers and privileged tourists is an uneasy one at best (Kingsbury 2011), and while these simmering tensions do not tend to unfold within the physically segregated enclaves they are more likely to if and when tourists venture off-site, where things like aggressive hustling and petty theft are far more common.

These subtle social tensions are further complicated in the Caribbean by the fact that different classes of hotel workers are often themselves racially stratified (Carty, 2009). To return

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to the case of Cuba, Carty (2009) found that the majority of the resorts there today are managed by expatriates (in spite of the government’s co-ownership arrangements) and many do not appreciate the cultural, social, and economic realities of the country. Further, Blacks represent less than 5% of Cuba’s tourism labour force – a much smaller proportion than the national population – and most of these do not even engage directly with tourists (Carty, 2009). Cabezas (2008) describes a similar racial stratification of labour in the Dominican Republic’s tourism industry. Other common problems associated with the nature of employment in mass tourism are long working hours, seasonal variations in employment, and a high staff turnover (ILO, 2012). In the case of Egypt, for instance, high rates of employee turnover reflect the poor conditions that many workers in the industry face, which in turn is seen to have inhibited the growth of hotel development there (El-Said, 2014). A related critique is that most employment in mass tourism offers little opportunity for promotions while trade union activities tend to be scarce or

suppressed (Gibson, 2009).

Another significant labour issue stems from the fact that the management of many all-inclusive hotels codifies the behavior of their workers. Kingsbury (2011) details the ways that worker’s behaviour is conditioned by management at a Sandals Resorts chain in Jamaica, such as always having to smile in the presence of guests and being encouraged to sing, and he argues that workers are controlled to such an extent that they can be seen to form part of the consumed tourism product. Kingsbury (2011: 651) also describes the posting of stern messages in worker-only spaces, out of sight from tourists, reminding them to be happy at all times in spite of how much pressure they are under, with slogans such as “remember the steam kettle; though up to its neck in hot waters, it continues to sing.” Under such circumstances where smiles are prescribed, they can be understood as little more than a curtain of happiness that hides the hardships and

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frustrations of workers (Gmelch, 2003), while keeping the tourists feeling welcomed in hotels and various sites.

Another well-established aspect of the working conditions in mass tourism is that many jobs are highly gendered. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2001: 74), in general “women occupy the lower levels of the occupational structure in the tourism labor

market, with few career development opportunities and low levels of remuneration.” On the supply side, one of the overarching goals of mass tourism operators is to establish a ‘flexible’

labour force, which can contract during low periods and quickly grow during peak seasons, and women disproportionately bear the brunt of this ‘flexibilization’. Some of this is rooted in

different work tasks male and female workers tend to be assigned in tourism spaces, which stems from wider societal norms and the projection of household divisions of labour, such that women tend to predominate in roles such as serving meals, working in kitchens, cleaning rooms, and making beds (Shaw and Williams, 2002). Although some women might, for various reasons, view this gendered division of labor in a positive light, such jobs tend to be more poorly paid and more seasonally variable. For instance, in the Dominican Republic, Cabezas (2008) describes how women only earn 68% of what men do in the tourism industry, made worse by the fact that non-managerial tourism wages are below the national average. These concerns are echoed by Duffy et al. (2015), who describe how women regularly have much heavier workloads than men without fair remuneration and make a call for urgent action to reduce the gender inequalities within the industry. Another gendered dimension of mass tourism in the Global South relates to

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the sex trade, which is another way that some social interactions are commercialized (Dogan, 1989), though this is beyond the scope of the discussion for the purposes of this dissertation.²

2.2.4. Research on Local Experiences with Mass Tourism

Empirical studies on the feelings and attitudes of local residents towards enclavic tourism development in the Global South have increased in recent years (Meidmand et al., 2017;

Figueroa and Rotarou, 2016; Sdrali et al., 2015), but the experiences and perceptions of residents in sites of newly emerging enclaves remain largely unexplored. In cases like Falmouth and Lucea, the recent onset of mass tourism has led to major changes in the social and economic life of the communities, and it is important to understand community perspectives about this transformation as it is unfolding. Because research on mass tourism is typically set in locations where the industry is well-established, there is not the same ability to examine previous aspects of community life that are being lost and modified, including perceptions of changing space.

There is a strong consensus in the literature that resident perceptions and attitudes have a strong effect on tourist experiences and hence the attractiveness of the destination, as well as the fact that local people within host destinations tend to be more welcoming towards tourists and tourism development in general when they have good perceptions of the industry and its contribution to the life of the community. Conversely, when there are widespread negative perceptions towards the tourism industry within host communities, there is evidence that residents tend to be indifferent or outright unwelcoming to the tourists (Garau et al. 2016).

Various experiences of residents have been documented across destinations in the Global South, including cases in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other parts of the

2 In some parts of the Caribbean, significant numbers of sex workers are men, with nicknames like ‘beach boys’ in Barbados and ‘rent-a-dreads’ in Jamaica, both of which have become part of the tourism product for certain constituencies (Weichselbaumer, 2012; Rhiney, 2012).

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Caribbean. In their study on mass tourism development in three Mexican communities (Cancun, Zihutanejo and Litibu), Monterrubio et al. (2017) identify job creation and an overall improvement in the standard of living in the communities as the main benefits highlighted by the local residents, and set these against the major negative impacts identified by local people, including local exclusion from tourist enclaves, displacement of traditional economic activities like fishing and farming by tourism, and increases in the prices of goods and services. In a study of enclave tourism growth in Akumal, Mexico, Buzinde and Manuel-Navarrete (2013) found that the expansion of the industry resulted in the exclusion of local residents from purchasing properties close to the Spanish-owned Bahia Principe Residential and Golf Resorts, as well as from property ownership near the desirable beachfront. Drawing on research with tourism workers who were prohibited by tourism business operators from buying land and building homes too close to the enclaves because of the view of such settlements, they also showed how restrictions were established so as not to disrupt “the imagined pristine touristic space” (Buzinde and Manuel-Navarrete, 2013: 487) that was being advertised overseas to prospective tourists.

Some attempts have been made to examine the level of trust residents of mass tourism spaces have for political actors (Nunkoo and Gursoy, 2017; Nunkoo, 2015), however little is yet known about how local people feel about their involvement, or lack thereof, in the planning process for mass tourism. Another important but under-studied impact of mass tourism development concerns how local people interpret the spatial changes in their communities resulting from mass tourism development; that is, how do things like physical walls and increased security personnel reshape people’s sense of place? This thesis attempts to shed some light on these perceptions of both procedural and spatial exclusion.

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Freitag (1994) documents the highly exclusionary nature of tourism space in Luperon, Dominican Republic, arguing that the resort in that community discourages any form of economic or social exchanges with the locals, save for seasonal jobs within the enclave itself.

Although the Dominican Republic has six different ports of call for cruise ships, Mexico has even more, and there are numerous cruise ship piers throughout the Caribbean, there has been little research on the responses of local residents to the particular opportunities and the challenges this form of mass tourism generates, which is another reason why the Falmouth case had the potential to add further insights to the existing scholarship.

2.3. Dependent Development in the Caribbean

Contemporary Caribbean societies demonstrate many traits that are a direct legacy of the slave plantation system, which was the main institutional form that European colonization and exploitation took in the region (Sinclair-Maragh and Gursoy, 2015). In his classic book, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World, Beckford (1972) theorized that the plantation was a ‘total institution’, in the sense that it cannot be

understood as a mere economic system. Rather, he argued, the plantation amounted to a powerful institutional force that comprehensively shaped the politics, culture, and social fabric of the societies where it was a pervasive form of production, and as such, left an extremely durable imprint in a way that transcends economics. Another reflection of this legacy can be seen in the fact that while most of the Caribbean region has been politically independent for at least a half century, the countries of the region (save Cuba) continue to have limited sovereignty over their own economic affairs (Allahar, 2012). This has manifested in the region’s historical and

enduring position in the world economic system as producers of cheap raw materials (e.g. sugar,

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bananas, coffee) and as a source of cheap labour for light assembly manufacturing and (in the British Caribbean) call centres. Services such as tourism have also consolidated a certain level of financial, technical, and other forms of dependence on the Global North for foreign direct

investment, skill-training, management personnel, and a range of imports, including food (Spenceley and Meyer, 2012; Weibing and Xingqun, 2006).

One of the biggest aspects of the contemporary struggle for economic sovereignty in the contemporary Caribbean relates to the deep and wide-ranging influence of the US, economically, politically, and culturally, which in many ways substituted for the waning European control following independence (Thomas, 1988). This new type of hegemony has been strongly influenced by the region’s close proximity to the US, which in 1823 took it upon itself the exclusive right to ‘protect’ the region from outsiders through the Monroe Doctrine (Allahar, 1995). The rise of neoliberalism further deepened the dynamics of ‘dependent development’ in the Caribbean region. Neoliberalism refers to policies that promote laissez-faire economics and erode the sovereignty of nation-states, such as trade and investment liberalization, privatization, and austerity (Slocum, 2006; Harvey 2005). The key multilateral institutions that shaped the neoliberal economic re-structuring in the Caribbean were the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), and it is widely recognized that the economic policies designed by these institutions had very polarizing effects, exacerbating already severe inequalities (Janis, 2014; Slocum, 2006).

The IMF and WB exerted their influence over economic restructuring in the Caribbean, and indeed throughout most of the Global South, through Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) (see, for example, Oosterbaan, Arku and Asiedu, 2012. For the champions of SAPs, they are seen to have improved the macroeconomic stability in the face of severe debt problems, but

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for critics SAPs did little more than perpetuate a cycle of borrowing, further indebtedness, and external policy decision-making, while the policies never resolved the trade imbalances that were at the root of the debt crisis (Meeks, 2007). In Jamaica, the state has wrestled with a

“monumental debt service burden” since the 1970s, that consumed as much as two-thirds of the annual government budget, a dynamic which in turn “starves social investment” (Weis, 2004:

483). The latter involves the reduction of support for a range of public services such as health, education, housing, welfare programmes, and food subsidies, the polarizing effect of which is compounded by the implementation of wage freezes geared to fostering competitiveness.

Neoliberal policies profoundly affected the decline of agriculture across much of the Caribbean (Slocum, 2006; Weis, 2004; Thomas, 1988). In Jamaica, neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s had a devastating effect on agricultural production, as the export-oriented plantation sector and the domestically-oriented small farm sector both struggle to compete amidst liberalization, reduced state support, and increasing competition (Weis, 2004). The eastern Caribbean has experienced an even more extreme agricultural decline, as banana farming lost its preferential markets in Europe and went “from riches to rags since the 1990s” (Klak et al., 2011: 34).

Neoliberal policies in the Caribbean did help to build a competitive niche in light manufacturing (Slocum, 2006), like garments and electronics assembly, as well as services like call centres. Key policies here were trade and investment liberalization and the establishment of Export Processing Zones (EPZs), also known as ‘Free Zones’ (in the sense of being free of taxation or labour and environmental regulations). However, these enclaves have experienced booms and busts, with Jamaica’s garment sector a notorious case of a short boom and sudden bust. By far the biggest sector where foreign investment has flowed throughout the Caribbean

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has been to tourism, with transnational hotels exhibiting a similar spatial pattern in which little or no linkages are formed or maintained with the rest of the national economy. These economic leakages tend to be highest in the poorest economies and in undiversified small island developing countries (Spenceley and Meyer, 2012; Jayawardena and Ramajeesign, 2003). Leakages of tourist expenditures have been found to be as high as 75% (Spenceley and Meyer, 2012), which occurs through corporations returning profits to foreign headquarters, the payment of salaries to foreign executives, and high import costs for a range of things, such as machinery, equipment, and food.

2.4. Mass Tourism Enclaves: Problems and Prospects

2.4.1. An Overview of Mass Tourism in Jamaica

The rise of tourism in Jamaica actually began in the late 19^th century, but the modern tourism sector cannot be seen to have really emerged until after the 1960s, with the increasing access of air travel to North American and European travelers and the increasing promotion by the government of Jamaica after its Independence in 1962. This transition can be understood as

The rise of tourism in Jamaica actually began in the late 19^th century, but the modern tourism sector cannot be seen to have really emerged until after the 1960s, with the increasing access of air travel to North American and European travelers and the increasing promotion by the government of Jamaica after its Independence in 1962. This transition can be understood as